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2017-05-03

Painful Divide

The Corruption of Our Democracy, part 2

Fastforward 25 or so years and it’s the year 2010. I’ve become a minister, and I’m serving a congregation in Gainesville, Florida. I’m also the president of the Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry of Florida, representing Florida’s 44 congregations in lobbying for Unitarian Universalist values in the Florida legislature in Tallahassee. One of the members of the board of this legislative ministry is a woman from the Venice, Florida congregation named Kindra Muntz. Kindra is interested and engaged in all our legislative ministry issue – housing, reproductive rights – but she is most passionate about democratic process: voting rights, gerrymandering, campaign finance.

2010 you’ll recall is the year that the Citizens United decision was handed down – and that was a clear step backward. After I left Florida, I’d still see Kindra every June at General Assembly. If it was an even-numbered year, when we were selecting a new Congregational Study Action Issue, Kindra was at work lobbying the delegates to select repairing our democratic process. And then, in 2016, Kindra’s issue won. Also on the ballot were, “Ending gun violence,” “a national conversation on race,” and “climate change and environmental justice.” Edging these out was Kindra’s proposal, “the corruption of our democracy.”

The argument that, in the end I think proved decisive for the delegates was that we’ll never be able to make progress on any of the other issues if we don’t first have a fair and functioning democracy. Kindra kinda had a point. But we have a deep problem of which money in politics is only the symptom of our divisions and of the pain and despair we feel from those divisions.

Here’s another symptom. Americans have been surveyed about whether they would be displeased or upset if their child married someone outside their political party. In 1960, five percent of Americans said they’d mind if their child married someone of the other party. By 2010, 40 percent say they’d be upset. 50 percent of Republicans say they wouldn’t want their daughter or son to marry a Democrat, and 30 percent Democrats say that about marrying a Republican.

And I get that. In fact, I admit that I’m a part of that. I am not immune to the divides that split our nation, and those divides have pushed me to a wider opposition to one entire political party than my parents or their parents felt necessary most of their lives. If my daughter had come home her senior year in college and announced she was engaged to a guy who, she went on to tell us, was the president of her campus’ chapter of the College Republicans, yeah, I’d feel that. I'm sure I'd have learned to like the fellow, but at first there'd have been a twinge of feeling I'd failed as a parent. I’m sorry, but I think I would have had that twinge. And please know, those of you who are Republicans, that I love and respect you, and am committed to offering you every service I can as your minister. I am thankful every day that you let me have that role in your life, and right now what I have to offer is my confession. I’m confessing the limits and the blinders of my biases -- and that I’m hurting. This level of political divisiveness hurts. I weep for my country.

I also weep from knowing our history -- the chicanery and genocide with which Europeans stole this continent, the terrible abuse and tragedy of slavery, and Jim Crow, and red-lining. Yet through those tears, it was possible to believe that we as a country were learning, were bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice. With this additional wound of such deep division, every hopeful possibility is dimmed. There’s no possibility of real democracy – “a way of life of free and enriching communion” -- when we are this divided, when our alienation from one another has reached the level it has

Much of the UUA material on the corruption of our democracy focuses on the role of money in politics, and corporate personhood, and the idea that money is speech. The Citizens United decision lifted limits on how much corporations can give to campaigns.

The role of money in politics is, indeed, a problem. It’s true that money doesn’t directly buy elections. The losing candidate often outspends the winning candidate. Last November’s presidential election is a particularly vivid case in point: The winning candidate, our current president, spent about half of what losing candidate spent. The biggest spender doesn’t always win, but if you don’t spend at least a certain minimum, you’re never taken seriously and don’t stand a chance. And that minimum keeps rising and rising. The enormous cost of election has driven our lawmakers into continual fundraisers.

The need for money tends to filter out centrist candidates, and candidates on the economic left. Candidates whose views are not broadly acceptable to the affluent can’t raise what is now the minimum to be taken seriously as a candidate.

Yes, that’s a corruption of democracy. Public funding of elections might help.

1. Openness to New Truth. "Religious liberalism depends first on the principle that revelation is continuous. Meaning has not been finally captured. Nothing is complete, and thus nothing is exempt from criticism." Our religious tradition is a living tradition because we are always learning.

2. Freedom. "All relations between persons ought ideally to rest on mutual, free consent and not on coercion." We freely choose congregational relationship and spiritual practice. We deny infallibility and resist hierarchical authority.

3. Justice. We are morally obligated to direct our "effort toward the establishment of a just and loving community. It is this which makes the role of the prophet central and indispensable in liberalism."

4. Institution Building. Religious liberals "deny the immaculate conception of virtue and affirm the necessity of social incarnation....Justice is an exercise of just and lawful institutional power." Institution building involves the messiness of claiming our power amid conflicting perspectives and needs, rather than the purity of ahistorical, decontextualized ideals.

5. Hope. "The resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism."(For Adams's full text, see HERE. For Liberal Faith, see HERE.)